Two and a half millennia ago Pythagoras initiated the scientific study of the pitch of sounds; yet our understanding of the mechanisms of pitch perception remains incomplete. Physical models of pitch perception try to explain from elementary principles why certain physical characteristics of the stimulus lead to particular pitch sensations. There are two broad categories of pitch-perception mod...

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . .... . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . .. . . . . . . . . . 277 CONSONANCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . ....... . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . .. . 278 TUNING AND INTONATION...... . . ........ . .....

We investigated categorical perception of rising and falling pitch contours by tonal and non-tonal listeners. Specifically, we determined minimum durations needed to perceive both contours and compared to those of production, how stimuli duration affects their perception, whether there is an intrinsic F0 effect, and how first language background, duration, directions of pitch and vowel quality ...

This paper aims to examine the contribution of pitch and pitch range to the perception of foreign accent produced by Chinese L2 speakers of German. A perceptual assessment of 8 Chinese speakers was conducted by a panel of 10 German native speakers. Phonetic acoustic analysis was carried out for these 8 Chinese speakers and 7 German speakers for comparison. The results show that the Chinese spea...

Pitch perception is critical for the perception of speech and music, for object identification, and for auditory scene analysis, whereby representations are derived for each sounding object in the environment from the complex sound wave that reaches the ears. The perceived pitch of a complex sound corresponds to its fundamental frequency. However, removal of energy at the fundamental does not a...

Results of a perception experiment show that the size of the pitch difference between spoken words on either side of a pause affects perception of pause duration, demonstrating that the auditory kappa effect can obtain in speech materials. The auditory kappa effect is an illusion whereby, in a sequence of tones and intervening silent intervals, the perception of the duration of the silent inter...

Recent work has proposed that prominence perception in speech could be driven by predictability of prosodic patterns, connecting prominence perception to the concept of statistical learning. In the present study, we tested the predictability hypothesis by conducting a listening test where subjects were first exposed to a 5-minute stream of sentences with a certain proportion of sentence-final w...

Enhanced low-level pitch perception has been universally reported in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). This study examined whether tone language speakers with ASD exhibit this advantage. The pitch perception skill of 20 Cantonese-speaking adults with ASD was compared with that of 20 neurotypical individuals. Participants discriminated pairs of real syllable, pseudo-syllable (syllables that do no...

Congenital amusia is a lifelong deficit in music perception thought to reflect an underlying impairment in the perception and memory of pitch. The neural basis of amusic impairments is actively debated. Some prior studies have suggested that amusia stems from impaired connectivity between auditory and frontal cortex. However, it remains possible that impairments in pitch coding within auditory ...

Although glottalization has often been associated with low pitch, evidence from a number of sources supports the assertion that this association is not obligatory, and is likely to be language-specific. Following a previous study testing perception of glottalization by German, English, and Swedish listeners, the current research investigates the influence of pitch context on the perception of g...